an After Effects Portal

May 26, 2015

The beauty of Adobe After Effects is that it's approachable for simple tasks
and at the same time has a feature set capable of producing complex film
quality effects. In the olden days we had to walk miles through snow to
pay for After Effects tutorials, if there were any, but now
there's tons of worthy free stuff. The biggest gotcha with this material
for beginners might be the new previewing features expected in the 2015 version of After Effects CC.

General sage advice is to start at the
beginning, but knowing Photoshop and Premiere or Final Cut gives you a
big head start. And remembering to "divide & conquer," that is subdividing tasks into doable chunks, will keep progress moving.

April 30, 2015

Removing flicker is often easy but can also be quite vexing with certain combinations of out-of-sync lights, electricity, and cameras found in time-lapse and slow motion footage. For discussion of some of the issues, tutorials, and 3rd-party plug-ins, see Flicker removal in Creative Cloud and beyond at Pro Video Coalition.

April 9, 2015

At NAB 2015 next week, Adobe plans to preview the latest features coming to Creative Cloud pro video apps. A webcast from
the NAB 2015 show floor on April 16 is also planned. The webcast will
provide a chance to see highlights of the release and chat in real-time
with presenter Jason Levine and #TeamAdobe.

March 20, 2015

A few years ago there was a spate of interest in chromatic aberration
-- fixing footage containing the color fringing, but mostly creating it
for motion graphics and VFX realism. Now, Quba Michalski has a new tutorial & preset (and donate button) in Chromatic Aberration Rig.

March 16, 2015

Nebulas can be created several ways in After Effects: with "cards in space" of real images, or generated by Fractal Noise or 3D particle systems, commonly fractal-displaced particle arrays like Trapcode Mir, Form, Hitfilm Atomic Particle, and other particle systems.

March 2, 2015

Andrew Kramer has been the most enthusiastic
provider of footage and tutorials on creating shockwave effects in After
Effects, and recently Daniel Brodesky created something similar, using
Trapcode Particular instead of Fractal Noise
for the base of the effect. There are a few other resources too, more explosion-related examples, but
much of what's been published is outdated or no longer available.